I go back and forth on Eddie Murphy. Half the time I think he's a genius, and the other half I think he's just a little man burdened with a talent too enormous for him to superintend alone, a talent he often appears not to deserve at all. I see Shrek, I remember how much I loved him back in 48 Hrs and Trading Places, but when I see Daddy Day-Care or The Haunted Mansion or Pluto Nash or Boomerang or The Distinguished Gentleman, I just want to cry at the waste of his time and mine.

Well, 48 Hrs and Trading Places now feel like a very long time ago, and he's never seemed as appealing as he did then, fresh off a stint as the youngest and most prodigiously funny and energetic performer on a still-young Saturday Night Live. By most accounts his career hit its middle-age-crazy period before he was 30, largely because he was a US household name before he hit 20. Somewhere in there lay the crucial moment when a young man in a hurry started believing all too fervently in his own bullshit. This resulted in overbearing expressions of egomania along the lines of Harlem Nights, in whose credits his name appeared no less than five times, including, fatally, as writer and director. There he cast his most beloved stand-up forebears, Redd Foxx, famous for his foul-mouthed 1940s and 1950s "party records", and Richard Pryor, by then burnt out as a comic force, and seemed to relish humiliating them for money.

That was about it for me and Eddie right there, and we were on the outs for a good decade thereafter, as he remained in his holding pattern of buppie rom-coms that never crossed over. However, when The Nutty Professor filled the screen with a family of six Eddies, one couldn't argue with the brilliance of many of his characters and conceits, nor with the fact that acting against himself uncovered subtleties hitherto undreamed of in his performances. The same went for his animated TV series The PJs, which he also wrote. Since then he has stepped into other people's movies - Bowfinger, Showtime - with varying degrees of success, but has otherwise retreated into voiceovers, remakes, sequels and kiddie trash. His Donkey in Shrek and its sequel are the high end of this, but be warned: Bad Eddie will return in Daddy Day-Camp and The Incredible Shrinking Man. Will he ever grow up?

Career high 48 Hrs, Trading Places, and The PJs

Career low: Most of it, but how's about Another 48 Hrs or Beverly Hills Cop III (and I and II, while we're about it).

Need to know Judging by the myriad references to "hammer-toes" and other things to do with podiatry throughout his oeuvre, I'm guessing Eddie is one major foot-fetishist.

The last word "I'd like to produce, direct, write, score and star in a film exactly the way Chaplin did. I'll do that before I'm 30." And we thank him for it.